The Moksha Gita : Swami Sivananda // Commentary : Chapter 3 -5. Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday, February 20, 2023. 07:30.

The Moksha Gita : Swami Sivananda

Chapter 3: The Nature of Maya - 5

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9, 10. Maya is of the nature of mind. Maya generates different degrees of illusions. Maya pervades everywhere. If your mind is destroyed by discrimination and Vichara, then Maya will not afflict you.

Maya is centred in the individual consciousness in the form of mind. Whatever Maya does, that the mind also does. Mind is miniature-Maya. The veiling and distracting activity of Maya is undertaken by the mind in the form of nescience and egoism. Nescience is seated in the innermost sheath or the Anandamaya kosha of the soul and the ego is seated in the intellect. The mind projects the physical body even as Maya projects the cosmos. The activity of the universe is going on in the human body too. The Chandogya Upanishad says that the space within the heart contains the earth and the heaven, the sun, moon, stars, lightning, clouds, wind, fire, etc., in the same way as the outer space contains. Whatever is found in the external universe is found exactly in the miniature cosmos or the human body. Jiva is therefore a degraded copy of Ishwara. And Atman, therefore, is Brahman.

There are different degrees in the manifestation of Maya or illusion. The power of disfiguring Reality is not of the same degree everywhere. Maya is more manifest and works more powerfully in inanimate beings than animate, more in brute nature than in refined, more in Tamas and Rajas than in Sattwa, more in the uncivilised than in the civilised, more on earth than in heaven, more in man than in the celestial, more in an aspirant than in a saint, more in the sleeping and dreaming states than in the waking, more in gross forms than in subtle. Maya is manifest in a progressive evolutionary basis on one hand and as a steady concealing of Reality on the other hand. In other words the whole process of appearance is in the domain of Maya.

Maya pervades in every quarter and cranny. There is nothing on earth or in heaven which is not controlled by the play of Maya. The universal change drags together with it the entirety of the individuals also and each individual is compelled by the cosmic change to change itself in the same manner befitting the cosmic process of Maya. Nothing here, not even a piece of straw, can be excluded from the operation of the law of Mayaic evolution. Maya is the ruling power which borrows its strength from Brahman.

When the mind is destroyed, Maya also is swept away from the vision of the individual. When the eye-sight is corrected, the appearance of two moons vanishes. When sun sets, there is no more the dance of the mirage. The whole universe is the perception by the mind of the Absolute Brahman in varieties of forms due to the fluctuations caused by desire for objective gain. Hence, the destruction of the mind is the brushing aside of the entire phenomena and that ends in the experience of the light of the Self.

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To be continued

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